


Wandering Spirits

by miserymire



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Genre: Adventure, Gen, Male-Female Friendship, OC/SI, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Third Person
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2020-05-14 16:25:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19277047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miserymire/pseuds/miserymire
Summary: An encounter with a stranger leaves Emilia in a casket. Alive. When she’s finally freed, she only hopes to return to her life, but there’s a big, hope-shattering problem: she’s been caught in the crossfire of an unknown force that’s rousing the dead, in a world she thought didn’t exist.





	1. Hell

Darkness. Darkness was the first thing she was aware of.

Emilia sucked in a breath, her first one since she woke. The air was stuffy.

That was good. Not satisfying, but good. She could feel, she could move. Somehow she knew she hadn't been able to for a long time.

What she didn't know was how she had ended up here, wherever  _here_  was.

Her attempt to sit up was slow and strenuous from the weak state she was in. She didn't get very far, though not due to her debility; her head banged into something. Her upper body fell back down, and she raised a shaky hand to rub at her forehead. When something crawled over her leg, she used her other hand to flick it off. As she moved, she felt skin brush against skin, making her realize that she was wearing nothing at all for some reason. Another something crawling up her shoulder reinvigorated her need to figure out where she was so she could get away.

Trying to feel for something that she couldn't see, she reached her hands up. Whatever was above her head seemed to be above her entire body. A wooden ceiling that close to the ground? She moved her arms out to her sides and found she couldn't extend them very far outward either.

A box. She was laying down naked in a box. An oppressive, unventilated, dark box...

_It's nighttime outside—her back is against the earth and a blurry face is above her and she's frantically struggling to get away—she reaches for the knife but she can't get it out of his grip—he's pressing it to her throat—and then—  
_

And then when she was left reeling in the darkness, her heart feeling like it was about to explode, she regretted wishing to remember.

Knowing that she had only been reliving a memory didn't make it feel any better. It made it worse. Because now she realized what she was in.

She remembered the moment where she knew, with what she had thought was absolute certainty, that she was going to die.

But she was moving. Feeling. Thinking. She wasn't dead. She was alive.

And she was in a casket.

"Get me  _out_!"

Emilia started to scream, pushing and banging against her confines with all the might she could muster. A few tears slipped from her eyes. She gasped for air between screams, but no matter how much she took in, it wasn't enough. She couldn't breathe.

What if nobody got her out? It hardly felt like a ' _what if_.' It felt inevitable. Nobody was going to get her out. She was going to die in here. This, this would be how she would spend the rest of her days, up until she actually died. That was just her luck—miraculously survive attempted murder, then die after being buried alive.

She thumped and scratched on her casket until her hands went numb, and screamed until her throat burned and her voice fizzled out. Then, she thought, maybe it was better to be quiet anyway.

She could wait until she heard someone pass by above ground, and then she could put all of her energy into trying to be as loud as possible to garner attention. She just had to hope that the six feet of dirt between them wouldn't prevent them from hearing each other.

If she could hear no one, if no one could hear her... She didn't want to think about it anymore. She didn't want to think about how long she would be stuck in her head, alone in the dark. Hours? Days?

She'd go insane. She was  _already_  going insane, and she'd been awake in her casket for minutes.

Had it been minutes? She wasn't sure. She couldn't keep track of time.

Against her will, Emilia's brain decided to fill in the nothingness with more memories of her last agonizing moments outside of her underground prison. With nothing to hear or see to help bring her out of it, it was hard to tell herself that they were only memories, that it wasn't happening anymore.

So she started to sing softly to distract herself. Her voice sounded terrible through her tears, but it was better than the silence that allowed unwelcome memories to run free in her mind.

Wake up. Kill bugs. Cry. Sing. Sleep. Wake up again. Kill bugs again. Cry again. Sing again. Sleep again.

That's how she thought everything was going, but there were times when she wasn't sure if she was awake or not. There were times when she wasn't sure if she was  _alive_  or not.

Maybe this was simply what death was like for her. Maybe her casket and her body were nothing more than imagination, representations of her consciousness.

But how would she be conscious if she was dead? She couldn't be dead. She was alive. But was she really alive? How could this nothingness be considered life?

Her thoughts went in circles, like everything else. With time, the facets of the circles gradually became more intense, harder to bear, like the air that became even harder to breathe. Flashbacks became impossible to distinguish from reality. Pleasant dreams became nightmares. That was the worst change—losing her dreams.

At least when she had good dreams, she wasn't conscious that she was  _here_ , even if it hurt to wake up and realize that she still was. But when they turned into nightmares, they were always like her flashbacks. She had no escape. Being asleep was hell, and being awake was hell, too.

She wondered frequently if that was what this was. Hell.

That theory came, in part, from her realization that none of her assumptions as to how she'd gotten here made sense. If she had been found after she was attacked, someone should have realized she wasn't dead. She should have been autopsied and probably should have been embalmed before her burial. So, if she really was found, then she hadn't been properly looked over by professionals before she was buried—but her own mother was a forensic anthropologist, so how could any of those oversights have slipped by _her_? To top all of that off, why would her family have buried her without clothes?

Being buried by the very man who tried to kill her didn't make sense, either. He would have had to have attended to all the wounds he gave her, or else she would have eventually bled out and died, but why would he have bothered to do that? Why try to save her after he tried to kill her, and why put her in a casket where she could have died from suffocation or dehydration after he tried to save her from blood loss? And why even bother with a casket? They weren't cheap. Why not just put her in the ground?

Both of those theories had gaps, and she got stuck in a circle of going back and forth with which one she believed in. That circle always came back around to her only other theory: Hell.

Eventually, Emilia ran out of tears. Her bouts of crying became nothing but episodes of staggered breathing. Not long after that, the circle of her life broke. It was no longer wake up, kill bugs, cry nothing, sing, sleep.

It was wake up, kill bugs, and scream and thrash around, because she couldn't drown out the screams clawing at her throat with songs anymore. Scream, scream, scream, and cry no tears as she screamed. She tried to make herself stop screaming multiple times when the sound brought back memories of screaming for her life the night she should have died, but she could never make herself stop for long. It was too much. She couldn't handle it anymore.

It repeated in her mind like a broken record, a new circle:  _I can't handle this anymore. I can't handle this anymore. I can't handle this anymore._

_I._

_Can't._

_Handle._

_This._

It felt like it would never end. She thought she would be stuck in a circle of teetering on the edge of her sanity for eternity.

But she was wrong. The circles broke again, and she could hardly believe that it wasn't a new hallucination. She saw something that she hadn't seen in what felt like years.

Light.

It was so bright that she saw nothing but white even when she closed her burning eyes, but after all that time in the dark, she was terrified at the thought of losing the light. She wondered if this was it, if her end had finally,  _finally_  arrived, or if she was finally being saved from her casket, though she was leaning more toward the death that she'd been longing for. Surely, she thought, she couldn't still be alive after all that time with no food or water or fresh air.

Regardless of whether humans or angels would greet her, knowing that her time in this hell was over left her euphoric.

Crisp air washed over her. She heard shuffling and felt arms wiggle their way under her neck and the backs of her knees. Her eyes blinked open, and they began to adjust to the light as she was lifted up out of her casket. A tannish blob was leaning over her, and the blue sky was behind it. The features of the blob slowly started to become more distinct in color and shape, forming the person who had freed her from her casket.

It took her a few seconds after regaining her vision to realize that he was a boy. His face was pretty, pretty enough to belong on an angel, even with concern distorting his features. He was somewhere in his mid-to-late teens, with hooded blue eyes, long and shaggy blond hair, and light skin littered with scars. That last feature made Emilia uncomfortable—not because of the scars, no, especially not now that she had to have her fair share—because of the mere fact that she could see enough of his skin to even know that he had so many. He was shirtless, only a belt over his shoulder covering up a small fraction of his skin. She didn't like the idea of some half-naked guy digging her from her grave, whether he was an angel or not. She didn't like that he was still holding her, either.

Her cheeks heated as she remembered that she was naked herself. Mortified, she pulled her hair in front of her chest and tried to cover her lower half up with her hands, though she knew he'd already seen everything.

Something even stranger than the strangeness of this stranger's partial nudity suddenly caught her attention—sticking out on either side of his head were long, pointed ears. They definitely looked real, but either they were real because they were in heaven and he was some nonhuman, angelic creature, or they were good fakes because they were on earth and this boy was a nutjob.

"This... This isn't heaven, is it?" Emilia croaked out.

His voice was soft and his face was caught somewhere between sadness and confusion as he answered her. "No..."

So he was just a nutjob. A grave-digging, shirtless nutjob with elf ears that reminded her of Link from the Legend of Zelda.

In any case, his answer brought her relief. Not that she had anything against the idea of eternal paradise, but she was happy that her life hadn't been stolen after all.

Her eyes still burned from being so unaccustomed to light. Positive that she wouldn't be losing the light anytime soon now, she let them close. She sighed as the burning subsided.

"Will you put me down?" she asked.

He maneuvered her to the ground at her request. Words could not describe how satisfying it was to finally feel something other than a hard casket beneath her, to feel the sun against her skin, to feel her lungs fill with fresh air. The only thing keeping her on edge now was that she wasn't wearing any clothes in front of a boy.

"...You look very ill," he said slowly.

She blew air out of her mouth. "I just spent  _God_  knows how long—" her voice started to taper, so she had to stop to clear her throat, "—trapped inside a casket. Call 911."

"Call nine-one-one...?" he repeated, emphasizing each syllable.

"Unless you're taking me to the hospital yourself... I know I need to see a doctor. Or ... do you wanna call my parents?" Just saying the last words excited her. Whether he took her to the hospital himself or not, she'd be seeing her parents soon, and her little brothers, and then the rest of her family and all of her friends...

...She wondered if they would be mad at her for letting this happen.

Several seconds passed before the boy's voice broke her out of her thoughts. "...I'm sorry?"

Emilia furrowed her brows and hoped that he could tell that she was glaring at him even though she kept her eyes closed. Did he think this was funny? "Use your phone to call 911, or call my parents." She tried to speak her demand loudly, but the effort made her voice crackle out toward the end.

"I don't know what you're talking about... I have severe memory loss right now. I wouldn't even know my own name if someone hadn't told me it."

Maybe his memory loss made him forget that shirts existed, too.

She sighed again. "Can you please take me to someone else, then? Or bring them back to me... The nearest person you can find. I'd walk, but... I don't think I can."

"I'll carry you," he said.

His arms tucked back underneath her, and she wished that she hadn't suggested he take her with him to find someone. Her body went rigid in his grasp. She tried to occupy her mind with thoughts of being reunited with her family instead of focusing on how she was completely naked and some random half-naked boy was holding her.

"It may be a while until we come across someone," the boy said. "It can be dangerous out here."

For as many times as she had relived the last waking minutes of her life before she found herself in the casket, she had never managed to recall much of what had led up to them. The clear words that suddenly rung through her mind— _"_ _Let me drive you home. It can be dangerous out here."_ —were accompanied by a fuzzy image of being in her car at night while what could only have been the man who would go on to almost kill her was outside speaking to her.

Nice. So she had been lured to what might as well have been her death like an idiot. What had been _wrong_  with her that night? She knew better than to trust a stranger, but for some reason she had, and that lapse of judgment nearly killed her.

...So why trust  _this_  stranger after the price she paid for thinking she was safe with one last time?

She kicked her stiff legs out of his arms and stumbled to the ground. The movement left her lightheaded, and her vision went black as she got to her feet. If she'd been found, her family would have buried her in their city's cemetery, and there was a cotton mill right by it. She could try to walk to the warehouses herself to find someone without amnesia who knew what a cell phone was.

Her plan to run off to the warehouses collapsed when her vision returned and she realized that she wasn't in the Memorial Park Cemetery. She wasn't in Eloy,  _period_. She doubted she was even in Arizona.

Ahead of her were two colossal mountains that looked like they were one that'd been split down the middle. Not once before had she seen those mountains in person, but they were still familiar.

She told herself that she only found them familiar because the boy's appearance had planted familiar thoughts in her mind. After so long being deprived of stimuli, her brain was trying to connect dots where there were none. It was only a coincidence that the mountains happened to look like that. Just because the boy looked like Link didn't mean that the mountains were Dueling Peaks. That was ridiculous.  _Beyond_  ridiculous. She mentally reprimanded herself for even indulging that impossible fantasy for a second, but the words she told herself did nothing to calm her heart or her nerves.

The boy walked in front of her and opened his mouth to say something, but he didn't get a single word out, because Emilia screamed.

He wasn't just shirtless—aside from his belts, he was  _everything_ less. And those belts covered  _nothing_.

"Dude, what the  _hell_?!" she yelled. "Why are you  _naked_?!"

His hands moved to cover himself up, but she'd already looked away. "Sorry..." he said. Quietly, he tacked on, "But so are you, you know."

Though she'd only inadvertently glanced down there for one horrifying second, she knew she'd seen something on his hip that looked an awful lot like the Sheikah Slate. But other things, things she couldn't attribute to this stranger's eccentricity, things even less deniable, were to her left. One of those things was jutting out of a river, and the other was far, far over the grassy hills beyond it. She had to do a double-take when she first saw them. She turned fully to her left, her eyes darting from one thing to another and her jaw slack.

So many emotions swarmed over her at the sight, fear being at the forefront. She couldn't find it in herself to scream again, but the urge was bubbling up.

In the distance was a volcano, and in the river beside the mountains was a tall tower that glowed blue in the center. The scene before her very eyes looked like it'd been ripped straight out of  _Breath of the Wild_.

"Where are we?" she asked in a whisper.

"Between the Hills of Baumer and the Dueling Peaks," he answered.

His answer was exactly where she thought they were, and it was exactly what she didn't expect to hear anyhow.

It wasn't enough. She needed to hear him say one more word.

Her voice dropped so low that she could hardly hear herself when she finally managed to ask, "In what kingdom?"

"Hyrule."

Maybe it was spurred on by his answer, or maybe it would have happened regardless—but that was when vertigo hit Emilia full force, and she felt herself begin to fall before everything went black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don’t think banners are very common on this site, but I used to post on fanfic forums where they were customary and I’ve always loved them so here’s a banner anyway.


	2. Insanity

When Emilia opened her eyes and saw something other than darkness, she gasped. She was looking up at a stylized red horse head embroidered onto a blue-green canopy, not straining her eyes in the darkness of her casket.

It all came back to her—how she had seen the light, how that weird naked boy had rescued her, how she'd devised a plan to run to the cotton mill only to realize that she wasn't in her hometown, how it had looked like she was actually in Hyrule and how the boy had confirmed her suspicions...

...No, that last part couldn't have been right. That had to have been part of an unusual dream that had blended in with the reality of being saved.

Stretching her arms above her head, she let out a yawn. She was still quite sore, though she felt better than she had in ... however long it'd been since that night. The bed she was laying on really wasn't all that soft, but anything was an improvement over the cramped casket she'd come to know.

She would've liked to have stayed in bed for longer, yet she knew that the longer she spent in bed would only be the longer she spent away from her family. Whether she was in Hyrule or not—and  _obviously_ , she thought, she wasn't in Hyrule—she wasn't  _home_ , where she should have been. Her bed didn't have a canopy and her house didn't smell faintly of hay. She needed to get to the bottom of this. She needed to return to her family, to let them know that she was (somewhat) okay, and to apologize, because she knew this had to be awful for them. She couldn't even begin to imagine how heartbreaking it had to be, finding out what had happened to her and having to bury her... Or worse yet, not knowing what had happened to her at all, if she'd been buried by the man who tried to kill her rather than them.

Slowly, she sat up and slid her legs over the side of the bed, her muscles aching from the movement. Her chest tightened as she caught sight of the numerous red scars across her tan skin. The ones on her hands, she remembered clearly, were from when she had stupidly tried to grab the knife by the blade to push it away; and the ones across her arms and torso and hips, the more superficial ones, were likely unintentional on the would-be murderers part, from when she was struggling to get away. She knew there was also one she couldn't see on her face, and the long one across her neck...

That one still gave her pause. Cuts across the neck were supposed to be extremely deadly, weren't they? It had seemed like it to her; she'd felt searing pain as it sliced through her neck, and then the memory rapidly faded to nothing. Maybe that had merely been the point where all the pain had finally made her pass out, and she had survived by the guy missing her carotids.

She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. She couldn't think about it any longer.

In an attempt to distract herself, she reopened her eyes and looked around the room she was in. The room didn't have real walls, or a real ceiling—it was all made of drapes held up by wooden posts, more like a tent than an actual room. There was another bed identical to the one she was on across from her, with a small nightstand between the two. A lantern was on that nightstand, along with a cup of water.

The prospect of finally quenching her thirst was so enticing that right away she stopped caring about everything else.

She quickly grabbed the water and took a drink. The feeling of it washing over her chapped lips and dry tongue and gliding down her raw throat was divine, and she promptly became desperate for more. She closed her eyes and started taking in big gulps. In seconds, she had downed it all. She tried futilely to get out the tiny droplets leftover in the cup as if such a minute amount of water would help, then finally pulled it from her lips with a dissatisfied whine.

After returning the cup to the nightstand, her eyes trailed back over to the bed opposite her. The beds in here ... really looked like the beds in the stables in—

Emilia pressed her palms to her eyes.  _Shut up_ , she told herself.  _You're only seeing connections because you're looking for them_. Had she not dreamt of that boy saying they were in Hyrule, she probably wouldn't have noticed any similarities. Lots of beds looked like that, and the room she was in didn't even match the stables. They had no separate bedrooms; the beds were all lined up around the stables' singular rooms in the game. So what if there were horse motifs all over?

Finished with trying to rationalize away her outrageous presumptions, she stood up from the bed. She would prove herself wrong—she would walk out of this room that was definitely  _not_  part of a stable, and she would find someone who was certainly  _not_  a Hylian, and she would borrow the cell phone they absolutely had to call her parents and tell them to come get her, and then she would do everything she could to get them to not be mad at her for putting them through hell.

She stood and wrapped the blanket from her bed around herself tightly. Just as she took a shaky step, the drapes she was headed toward opened up, and in stepped her rescuer.

His long blond hair was pulled back into a low ponytail, and he was, thankfully, wearing underwear this time. But his underwear looked exactly like—

She stopped herself again. She wouldn't let herself so much as  _think_  that name or anything related to it. Him wearing  _those_  underwear and having  _that_  object on his belt didn't have to mean anything like that at all. All it meant was that he was a nutjob, which she'd already figured out early on.

"I got some underwear," was the first sentence to leave his lips.

Words escaped her, so she simply nodded.

There was an awkward pause before he spoke again. "Sorry for making you uncomfortable yesterday. It's not like I  _usually_  run around naked—well. I wouldn't remember. Maybe I would usually do that. I don't really know who I am. But I was only naked then because I woke up naked. Much like you."

She nodded once more, and then there was another awkward pause because she didn't know how to respond to that, either. When she decided to change the subject, she ended up asking a question that she almost didn't want to hear the answer to. "What's your name?"

"Link."

A lump grew in her throat, restricting her breathing.  _That doesn't mean anything_ , she tried to reassure herself. She went to school with a Link; it wasn't some unheard of name. The real kicker would be the name of their location, which she told herself would be somewhere in America. "And where are we?"

"Not far from where I found you. I brought you to Dueling Peaks Stable."

She felt as if she wasn't in control of her body as she pushed past him, past the drapes he'd come in through. The lump in her throat grew bigger, and her chest tightened even more.

It wasn't quite like it was in the game—there were no beds in the main room, and there were multiple tables and chairs—but it was close enough. Two guys standing together turned to look at her, as did the person manning the counter toward the front, and they looked like real-life versions of the men from the stable, pointed ears and all. The man behind the counter said something to her, but she didn't comprehend it. Through the large open arches, she could see a glowing shrine and Beedle pacing around with his oversized backpack.

Emilia ran back into the bedroom and fell to her knees in front of the bed she'd been on.

... _This can't be real_.

The isolation from being stuck in her casket for so long had to have finally shattered her mind and driven her completely mad.

"Snap out of it," she whispered. "Snap out of it. Snap out of it."

She was only vaguely cognizant of the boy appearing in her peripheral and crouching down next to her. Two words managed to break through to her: "What's wrong?"

"I'm hallucinating and I need to snap out of it.  _Snap out of it,_ " she said, voice rising in pitch and warbling.

"...You aren't hallucinating."

She didn't realize he had spoken until after the fact, but when she realized what he'd said, his message truly went through.

He was right.

She  _couldn't_  have been hallucinating. She'd had plenty of experience with hallucinations during her time in the casket, and they were never like  _this_. She could see the boy crouching to her side, feel the blanket wrapped around her, hear people talking outside, taste the lingering freshness of the water on her tongue, and smell a hint of hay in the air; she was experiencing far too much at once for everything to be a hallucination.

Beyond that, when she'd had hallucinations before, she had never been aware of how unreal they were. She knew it couldn't be a simple dream, either, for that same reason. She'd never been able to even consider the possibility that she was dreaming while she was. Her dreams were never vivid nor fantastical enough for her to question them; they almost always featured real-world scenarios that she wouldn't blink an eye at. The mere fact that she could tell this felt unreal, in itself, made it real.

But if she wasn't hallucinating, that meant she was genuinely  _there_. In Dueling Peaks Stable, in Hyrule, speaking to  _Link_. It made no sense. She had been nearly murdered, then buried alive, and somehow her casket had been transported to a world that only existed behind a screen?

"Are you okay?"

Emilia blinked several times in quick succession, coming out of her thoughts and looking over into his eyes. "I'm— _no_ , I'm not okay," she said. "I don't—I'm not—I have no idea how I got here. I'm not  _from_  here. I'm from—I'm from..."

She had always been truthful to a fault, vastly preferring the consequences of telling the truth over the guilt of lying even at times when it would have been so much easier to lie. Now, she didn't know whether to tell the truth or not. He probably wouldn't believe the truth if she did tell it. Even  _she_  could hardly believe it.

He didn't seem bothered by how long it was taking her to try to get the words out. "From where?" he gently encouraged.

Her mouth gaped as she attempted to make a choice amid all the panicking going on in her head. When she settled, she settled on the middle grounds—not the whole truth, but not a whole lie, either. "Another country."

"Ah." There was no hint on his face that he didn't believe her. "What country?"

"Arizona," she blurted out. Her eyes widened.  _Did I really just say that?!_

Before she could start digging herself in an even further hole and making herself sound stupider by correcting her mistake, he tilted his head and said, "Oh. I don't remember... Is Arizona close to Hyrule?"

It took her only a second this time to come up with an answer that would satisfy his question and adhere to her personal stance on lying. "No, it's not. I mean, I don't even know where Hyrule  _is_. I've  _heard_  of it, but... I really have  _no_  idea how I could have possibly gotten here from Arizona."

"Do you remember what happened before you showed up here?" he asked.

_She's heading home from June's house—her car breaks down and her phone is dead, so she can't call for help—she decides to lay down in the back to sleep for the night—the blurry-faced man pulls up and convinces her to let him drive her home—she gets out of her car and—_

She already felt like she was going to throw up whatever was left in her stomach, if there was anything left in there at all. Before she could get lost thinking about it, she focused on coming up with a bare-bones version that she could tell.

"I was outside in Arizona one night, and this man came up to me," she slowly said.

"And...?" he prompted.

And... She couldn't say it.

But it must have been clear enough on her face. "...Something bad happened," he said.

She gave a tiny nod. Her eyes started to sting, but tears didn't come, leaving her grateful that she was still dehydrated. He didn't need to see her cry. She'd already unwillingly exposed enough of herself to him.

"I'm sorry... But I'm sure we can figure out what's going on," he said.

" _We_?" she quietly repeated. "You... You'll help me?"

He offered a kind smile. "I already talked to someone who I think can help you. She's an old woman who knew what was going on with me, so she'll probably figure out what's going on with you. She lives fairly close to here, in Kakariko Village, and she asked me to bring you to her when you woke up. Her name is Impa."

That name gave Emilia hope. If anyone in this world would know what was going on, it would be Impa. "Okay," she said, voice wobbling with—nervousness? Anticipation? She didn't know. "A-are we going? Now?"

"And miss breakfast here?" he said, raising his thin brows.

_Someone's a glutton in real life, too_. "I didn't realize there was breakfast here."

"Meals are included with the room." He stood up. "We'll go to Impa after we eat. I'm  _starving_."

A strong pang of hunger hit her, leaving nausea in its wake. She nodded in response, worried that opening her mouth would lead to retching. Her legs felt like jelly beneath her as she wordlessly followed Link out of the room.

The two guys standing together eyed her again, but said nothing; the man behind the counter spoke to her again, asking if she was all right, and she fully heard it this time. She parted her lips as little as needed to tell him that she'd been better. A breeze wafted in the smell of food through the open arches, intensifying her nauseating appetite. She quickened her steps, catching up with Link.

She paused for a moment as she stepped out, stunned by the Dueling Peaks. Somehow, they looked even bigger than she remembered, reaching impossibly high into the air.

To the side of the stable was the cooking pot—a bit farther away from the entrance than she recalled it being in the game, on account of the stable itself being larger—along with several round tables and stools. A table right next to the pot with no seats had two plates of food, two cups of water, and a tall water pitcher atop it. The man standing in front of it was a duplicate of the receptionist.

"Your omelets are ready," he said to them, gesturing to the plates.

They each thanked him as they grabbed a plate and a cup, and Emilia wasted no time gulping down the water as she followed Link's lead over to one of the tables. A mature woman, familiar to Emilia as a character that always stayed around this stable, was already sitting at one of the four seats around it. Link sat down, and Emilia chose to sit at the stool opposite him where she could still have the view of the Dueling Peaks. He dug right into his food, but satiating her thirst continued to hold priority over eating for her.

"My, you were thirsty, weren't you?" the woman asked as Emilia sat her emptied cup down.

"Still parched," Emilia sheepishly admitted.

Hearing that, the man who'd prepared their food came to the table with the pitcher of water and filled her cup to the rim. She thanked him once more before bringing the glass back to her lips.

"You've been looking much better since I gave you that potion yesterday," the woman said.

Emilia lowered her cup and looked inquisitively at her. "You gave me a potion?"

"You woke up very briefly yesterday when Link brought you here. I gave you a potion, spoke to you some, and helped you settle in bed. Do you not remember any of that?"

She searched for a memory of that happening while taking another drink, but she found nothing. The last thing she remembered before waking up was Link telling her they were in Hyrule. She shook her head, saying, "I must not have really been conscious..."

"I guess I should have expected as much with how you were talking," the woman said with an easy grin. "My name's Sagessa. You said yours is Milia...?"

"Emilia," she corrected.

" _Em_ ilia. All right. Well, I'll stop holding you up from eating, now. I'm sure you're hungry."

After finishing the last sip of her water, she placed the cup on the table and grabbed the fork. She thought she should be desperate to eat, yet she could hardly make herself swallow the first bite of her omelet. It took every ounce of willpower she had to force the food down, knowing she'd only regret it later if she didn't.

She took in her surroundings as she tried to ignore her churning stomach. Two young boys, clearly twins, were running around and playing. They reminded her of her brothers, Nicolas and Sebastian, when they were younger, though the sets of twins didn't resemble each other physically. For as often as she found Nic and Bas to be annoying, she missed them so much it hurt, and she couldn't look at the boys for long. Her attention went back to the mountains and stayed there.

With her omelet only halfway eaten—and Link having been done eating all of his for a couple of minutes already—she pushed her plate away. Her stomach, shrunken after all that time being empty, was unable to handle any more.

"You gonna finish that?" Link asked. When she shook her head, he reached his hands across the table and asked, "Can I have it?"

"Um, sure."

Her answer was barely out of her mouth before Link was picking her plate up and digging into her leftovers. He scarfed it all down in less than a minute while she watched, feeling weirdly impressed.

"So," he breathed out, standing up. "Ready to go to Impa?"

Emilia stood, and her eyes flitted to the gap between the mountains. "...How long would it take to walk to where you found me?"

He glanced over his shoulder. "Ten, fifteen minutes. Why?"

"I just... I want to see what I was in all that time from the outside." She shrugged. "I know it probably sounds stupid, but..."

"We can go if you want."

Sagessa bid them safe travels, and the man by the cooking pot told Emilia she could keep the blanket for now. Link thanked Sagessa for paying for their stay, and Emilia echoed him before they started off. Though her legs were already feeling stronger and less jelly-like, Emilia still walked away slowly, each step making her stomach slosh around. Link kept pace with her without complaint.

"You won't need that blanket for long," he said. "You can get some clothes in Kakariko Village. That's where I got my underwear."

She thought that was strange—he was supposed to wake up wearing underwear, not receive them later on, and he was supposed to find the old shirt and pants in chests in the Shrine of Resurrection, then the Hylian trousers out in a chest by the Temple of Time...

But he also wasn't supposed to find  _her_  buried alive on his way to Kakariko Village, so who was she kidding?

"I don't have any money to buy clothes, though," she said.

"You won't have to. Impa gave these to me for free, and her granddaughter gave some of her clothes to another girl that woke up like you."

Emilia perked up at that. "Somebody else woke up in a casket?"

Link nodded, and her mind started racing at a hundred miles a minute. What if this girl was from her world? She could have someone to relate to, someone who could help her find solace with knowing that she wasn't all alone in this... She hastened her stride, wanting to see her casket and then get to this mystery girl as soon as possible.

Between the mountains, she saw corpses of Bokoblins splayed out on the other side of the river—what happened to exploding away into purple mist?—but that was it as far as monster sightings went. Their quiet and uneventful walk neared its end some fifteen minutes later when they emerged on the opposite side of the Dueling Peaks and a wooden box came into view.

Link let himself fall behind as Emilia approached her casket. She stopped a few feet away to examine it. There was a large pile of displaced dirt behind it, and some of the bottom remained partially in the earth. She could already see where part of the top right corner had been poking out, obvious from the relative lack of dirt ingrained into the wood there.

It was so badly worn down that had all of it been unearthed to begin with and not just that one section, she thought she would have been able to kick the lid off herself. Even the metal clasps were nearly rusted away. Despite its bad shape, there were clear indications that it had been professionally crafted, throwing a wrench into her theory that the man who'd nearly killed her had simply slapped together some boards to create a homemade casket. On the other hand, the inside wasn't covered with satin or silk and there was no pillow inside as per usual with traditional caskets (which she had known from the start), and that threw a wrench into her theory that she'd received a proper burial.

In the end, seeing her casket only left her with more questions than she'd had beforehand. Her only other idea was that maybe this wasn't the casket she was originally buried in at all, that whatever being out there that decided to bring her to this world had simply plopped her body into a different one.

With a frustrated sigh, she turned to Link. He was standing yards back, looking down at the Sheikah Slate in his hands. Suddenly, it felt like the wind was knocked out of her as everything hit her all over again with a shock unlike before. That really was  _the_  Sheikah Slate being held by  _the_  Link—who had  _spoken_  to her—and  _he_  was going to take her to  _the_  Kakariko Village to see  _the_  Impa... Though she had already considered it and come to the conclusion that she couldn't have been hallucinating, she almost expected to come to in the darkness of her casket at any second.

"Link?" she called. It felt bizarre to say his name, like it signified a reluctant acceptance of the reality around her.

As his eyes made contact with hers, she momentarily felt breathless again. "Are you done here?"

She nodded, and he came up to her, holding the Sheikah Slate out between them. The map was pulled up on the screen, zoomed into what Emilia identified as Kakariko Village.

"I want to try something," Link said. He pointed to a glowing blue symbol on the map. "This is a shrine that I can teleport to with this device. I want you to grab onto it, and we can see if it can teleport both of us. If it can, we'll be in Kakariko Village in seconds. If it doesn't bring you with me, I'll come back to get you."

Emilia reached out to grab the sides of the Sheikah Slate with trembling hands. "Okay. It doesn't hurt or anything, does it?"

"No, but it does feel ... different. Ready?"

_Ready?_  To do something that shouldn't exist, to get to a village that shouldn't exist, to talk to a person who shouldn't exist?

"No," she said. "But I'll never be, so let's go anyway."


	3. Sheikah

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for taking eight months to update this. I suck.

_Different_  was the word Link had used to describe the way teleportation felt—if there was a stronger word, Emilia would have used that. It was unlike anything else she had ever felt before, like her body was liquefied and poured away. While it hadn't hurt, as Link had promised, it left her feeling unsteady.

She was on the hill overlooking Kakariko Village when her body reformed from the droplets, her feet on the cool surface of the base of a shrine. The sight of the village and the shrine up close made her heart begin to race again. Though they were so close to the animated versions she knew, they were startlingly  _real_.

As she and Link started down the hill, she thought that the village wasn't quite as close to its game counterpart as the shrine was. She could easily identify some of the structures below, but there were a few more she was sure hadn't been there. Though the village was still small, the additions made the game version seem much smaller, much less accommodating to the people who called it home.

Emilia self-consciously wrapped the blanket tighter around herself when they made it down into the heart of the village. A few people were out that she could see along the way—an old man tending to a pumpkin patch, two young girls playing, the greeter to the clothing shop, and one of the guards of Impa's house. The greeter called out as they passed her by that Enchanted had cute clothes and that it looked like Emilia needed some. Flustered, Emilia muttered that she had no money.

They stopped at the bottom of the stairs leading up to Impa's house. The guard there—she wasn't entirely certain which one he was, but she guessed it was Cado—looked her over, and she shrunk behind Link. It was hard to look into his eyes, so Emilia instead settled her sights on the stunning waterfalls and cliffs that framed Impa's house and prayed for him to just let them through.

"Is this the girl you spoke to Lady Impa of?" the guard asked.

"The one she asked to see, yes," Link said.

The guard nodded and stepped aside. Head down, Emilia stole one last glance at him before ascending the stairs with Link.

Her heart felt like it was going to beat out of her chest when they got up to the double doors and Link knocked on them. An old voice called from inside, giving them permission to enter. Link strode in without any hesitance. It took Emilia an extra second to force herself to follow him in, and she stopped right in front of the doors, taking in the sight of the house. Aside from the addition of a short-legged table with several cushions on the floor around it, it didn't appear that far off from the house she was familiar with. They were nearly identical.

Right down to the tiny old lady sitting atop a pile of cushions toward the back of the room.

Impa's mouth spread into a grin, showcasing what few teeth she had left and making the countless wrinkles on her face sink even deeper into her skin. She gestured with her knobby fingers for Emilia to come forward. "I invited you in, didn't I?" her voice crackled.

Reassuring herself that she had no reason to be so nervous, Emilia approached her. Impa gave her the same scrutinous eyeing that the guard had, and Emilia again pulled the blanket tighter around herself. The grin that had been on Impa's face faltered when her line of sight looked to fall right on Emilia's neck. The lump in Emilia's throat rose again, and with it came a burning hot awareness of the scar there.

"So, you're the one Link found alive in a casket," Impa said. "Milia, is it?"

"Emilia." She wondered how far the mispronunciation of her name had spread in the day since she'd slurred it out while virtually unconscious.

Impa turned her attention to Link. "Thank you for bringing her to me. Why don't you go spend some time in the village and let us speak in private for a while?"

Link nodded, gave a quick little smile to Emilia, and turned to leave. As soon as she heard the doors shut behind her, Impa's eyes met hers again. Her expression was serious, grave. Emilia wasn't sure she wanted to hear what she had to say anymore. That look alone gave her the feeling Impa had no good news to give.

"You were murdered," Impa said.

The words hit Emilia like a truck. They were so blunt, so certain—and so wrong. "No, I wasn't," she said indignantly. "I was  _almost_  murdered."

"You truly never died?" Impa asked, curious but unconvinced. "If you don't mind me asking, how did you get to be in that casket, then?"

"Um, well—I don't remember how I got in there, but... It wasn't because I was  _dead_. Whoever buried me just thought I was. Obviously, I wasn't, if you couldn't tell by—you know, me being ... not dead."

Impa blew air out of her nose. Due to her blank expression, Emilia didn't know if her half-hearted laugh was meant to be derisive or not. "So, the only reason you believe you never died is that you're alive?"

"Yes...?" It was such an obvious answer, but the way Impa had asked as if it was a stupid question made her confidence waver. "That's ... kinda how dying works."

"Under normal circumstances, it is, yes. I do not know if Link told you, but you are not the only one to have been found alive in a casket recently. Just days ago, one of our townspeople heard muffled cries for help from under the ground; and lo and behold, it was my own grand-aunt, who had died 154 years ago when my mother was just a baby. There is no doubt that she rose from the dead. Tell me—what year were you born?"

Emilia floundered, unsure of how to answer. She had no idea what year it was here, but she knew Hyrule had been around for over 10,000 years. If she admitted to being born in the year 2000, Impa would take that as proof of her having been dead and buried in Hyrule's earth for thousands of years, when the reality was that she wasn't from Hyrule at all.

"Did you not hear the question I asked you?" Impa said, interrupting her contemplation.

"I did, but I was—I was just trying to do the math, in my head," Emilia forced out. She looked down at her feet and wrung her fingers. "I'm from—I'm from another country. You probably haven't heard of it. And, um, we count years differently. I was born in the year 2000 there, eighteen years ago, but I don't know what year that would be here… I, uh, was never really good at math."

It became uncomfortably silent, and it stayed that way for an uncomfortable amount of time. Finally, practically feeling the daggers Impa had to be looking at her, Emilia peeked up.

Impa did not look as angry as Emilia's pessimism had assumed she would; she didn't look mad at all. Her face was devoid of any emotion whatsoever.

"…You are a  _terrible_  liar."

Emilia's entire body went hot, and the beginnings of sweat drops formed on her nape. "But—but that  _is_  the truth. I'm from another country, I was born eighteen years ago in 2000, and I have no idea what year it is here."

Impa leaned forward on her cushions, and the way she looked at Emilia made her feel that she could see right through her soul. "That much may be true, but you and I both know there is something you are hiding. It is of utmost importance that you are cooperative and offer any information you have that may help us find what has caused this to occur. Lying will not help any of us."

"I'm  _not_  lying, I'm just—"

"Perhaps not _intentionally_ or even fully," Impa interrupted curtly. "But a lie by omission is a lie nonetheless. Surely you must understand why I hesitate to believe that you are telling me the whole truth. Your scars speak a story that your words do not—and the story told by your scars matches with the story I know to be true of my grand-aunt."

"But our stories are different. I don't..." Emilia huffed frustratedly. "I don't know how I can prove it to you, but I  _swear_ , it's just a coincidence that we both were found in caskets. I didn't die like she did."

"Is that what you  _truly_  believe, or what you  _want_  to believe?" Impa mused quietly.

"It  _is_  what I believe," Emilia said, a bit too quick. "I didn't die. I  _couldn't_  have died."

"Incredulous, aren't we?" Impa said under her breath. She let out a long sigh and readjusted herself, sitting upright and smoothing out her skirt. "Whatever you say. Let's not focus on whether you died or not. Regardless, am I correct in assuming that you do not know the reason for your awakening in a casket here?"

Finally, a change in focus—Emilia didn't want Impa grilling her on her not-death any longer. She nodded. "Yeah... I really have  _no_  idea how I got here. I mean, even if I died like you seem to think I did, my casket never should have ended up here. I should be buried in Arizona."

"Arizona, hm? I don't recall ever having heard of such a place in my 120 years on this planet... Where is it in relation to Hyrule?"

_Crap._

Out of all the questions she could have asked, of course she chose the one most difficult to convincingly lie about...

 _Just tell the truth and get it over with. So what if she doesn't believe it? She won't believe obvious lies, either, and you_ are _a terrible liar..._

Emilia squeezed her eyes shut, too embarrassed to look at Impa while telling her the ridiculous, unbelievable truth. "I know how crazy and fake this has to sound—even  _I_  can't really believe it—but Arizona is in another  _world_ , or dimension, or universe. I have no clue which. All I know is that on my home planet, in my world, there is no Hyrule. There just  _isn't_ ," she said, voice quivering more with each sentence. "No one from there could have, or  _would_  have, buried me in some country that  _doesn't exist_  to us. It's not  _possible_  for me to be here."

"…And yet, here you are," Impa gently said.

When Emilia opened her eyes to look at her again, her vision was blurred. "You... You believe me?"

"Reason tells me I should not ... but there is no discernable reason yet for my grand-aunt to have risen from the dead, either." The corners of Impa's lips raised the smallest amount. "I believe you. My people have always had an eye for the truth, and I sense no deception in what you've told me."

Relieved at the faith Impa had in her, she let out a shaky breath and blinked away the beginnings of tears that had formed in her eyes. "So... Do you have any idea how I got here? Or how I could get back...?"

"I'm afraid not, but whatever force is responsible for your appearance here is a mighty one, to be sure. In the face of such a powerful force, I believe your return might well be impossible." Well, there went all of Emilia's relief—gone in record time. "But all hope is not lost. I find it very unlikely that you and my grand-aunt are alone in your awakenings here; perhaps if we find others like you and her, we can figure out what is responsible for this, and from there we can see if there is some way to send you home. I've planned for her and Link to start searching for others awoken across this land, and for them to make a trip to someone who has resources which could potentially uncover the reasoning behind this phenomenon. I would like for you to travel with them."

It took a second for Impa's words to sink through. She wanted her to travel around Hyrule—the actual, real freaking  _Hyrule_. It was something straight out of a fantasy, the sort of thing she would have daydreamed about while bored out of her mind at work or school, and it was  _real_.

But of all the daydreams to be made real,  _why_ , oh  _why_ , couldn't it have been one in any other version of Hyrule? Out of every time period in its long history, she just  _had_  to wind up in the one with Lynels and Taluses and Hinox and Guardians.  _Guardians_.

Impa's brows drew together. "Are you all right with that?"

Her first thought— _no_. She would never survive out there. It was hopeless. She hadn't even been able to defend herself from an average-sized human man. There was no doubt in her heart that she would die, for real this time, before ever finding out what brought her here, so why bother?

But on second thought— _why not?_  She'd have trouble just sitting around when she was itching to find out what was going on, even if her quest for the truth would put her in the heart of danger. Besides… This was a scenario she couldn't have ever dreamt of actually happening, so why not make the most of it all?

It wasn't like she had anything to lose. She'd already lost everything.

"Nothing to lose," Emilia breathed out, more to herself than Impa. She nodded resolutely. "I'll go."

"Once you've readied yourself for your travels, we'll all come together to have a quick discussion, and then you shall make your leave. There is a bathhouse stocked with towels and soaps next door to my abode that you are welcome to make use of." Impa motioned to her left, where a tiny stack of folded clothes sat on the floor next to the staircase. "My granddaughter has offered to give you these to wear. She would have offered you more, but the only non-undergarments she has are outfits we do not oft share with others outside our tribe."

Emilia grabbed the clothes from the floor. It was only a bandeau bra and boxer briefs that looked like the feminine counterpart to the underwear Link had. Her cheeks were already warm simply imagining walking around Hyrule in only them. She'd never been self-conscious about her body beforehand—she'd had no problem strutting around in her bathing suit like she owned the place at the pool she worked at in the summer—but after what happened...

"I promise you, they're clean. She's never worn that pair," Impa said.

"I wasn't... I wasn't even thinking about that, but, um, thanks for the clarification. I'll get going to the bathhouse now."

Impa nodded once, and then Emilia turned and left. Her tensions eased as the doors shut behind her and a refreshing gust of wind blew by.

She looked for Link as she walked down the stairs, but the only people she could see from where she was were the guard and the greeter. It wasn't until she was almost at the bathhouse that she saw Link. The bathhouse was in the spot where the cooking pot and eating area had been, and both that and the produce store next to it were farther over. Link was at one of the tables, tapping away on the slate's screen.

Emilia peeked into the bathhouse to make sure nobody was in there before she entered. Though currently empty, it was clearly meant to be communal. A divider ran down the center of the room, and each side had shelving with toiletries, numerous taps and small stools lining the walls, and a shallow pool of water toward the back. She could only guess that one side of the room was meant for males and the other for females, but as far as she could see, there was nothing to indicate which was which. Hoping it was the right one, she chose to go to the right side.

Her fangirl pulled through and allowed her to read the bottles and boxes on the shelves well enough to figure out what was body soap and what was shampoo. While grateful that they had running water and cleansing products at all, she was a bit let down that she couldn't find any conditioner. It was going to be hell to detangle the absolute mess that was her hair without it.

After much work getting majority the knots out, she was satisfied enough. She would've liked to have vigorously washed herself for hours to try to get rid of the grimy feeling that covered every inch of her skin, but she became antsy to get back into clothes after so long without them. She dried herself off as much as possible with a towel when finished, lamenting the lack of a hair diffuser—it was already chilly enough out without having wet hair—and then got dressed. The bandeau top, to her surprise, stretched to fit her chest perfectly, and it didn't seem like it was going anywhere unlike the strapless bras she'd had no luck with back home.

She threw the blanket from the stable around her shoulders like a shawl and pulled her hair over it before leaving the bathhouse. Looking around, she didn't see Link anywhere, so she figured he'd gone back to Impa's.

The guard confirmed that, telling her they were waiting for her, and let her through. When she made it up to the door and knocked, Impa's voice called out for her to come in.

Impa was not at the back, but rather sitting on her cushions at the head of the small table. Sitting to her right was Link, to her left was who Emilia figured to be Paya by her distinctive hair and tattoos, and next to Paya was who Emilia could only presume to be Impa's grand-aunt. The shape of her eyes was doe-like, innocent, in stark contrast to the blood-red color of her irises, and there were three red triangles tattooed under each eye to go with the Sheikah symbol on her forehead.

"Emilia, this is my granddaughter Paya, and my grand-aunt Avera," Impa said, gesturing to each of the girls. "Please, sit down."

Emilia took a seat across from Avera, soaking her in all the while. She knew she hadn't met anyone that looked quite like her back home—as far as she was aware, it wasn't really possible for an Asian girl to have naturally snow-white hair, red eyes, or elf ears—but there was something so familiar about her.

"I have some potentially unfortunate news, Avera," Impa said. "While we know that you were born, died, and brought back to this very land, Emilia does not seem to be quite like you. She did not die here. She's from a foreign, far-away country, and her being buried here should have been impossible."

Avera's striking eyes met hers, making Emilia's heart flutter. Her white brows creased. "But... We are connected, somehow. I can feel it. Can you?"

Emilia grimaced. "I... I don't know. I feel ...  _something_. But I don't understand how we both could have been awakened by the same thing. It makes sense for  _you_  to wake up here, because you died here, but..."

"Still, there must be  _something_  connecting both occasions," Impa said, "and I would think it is improbable that you two are the only ones to have something like this occur to you. Truth be told… I do have one small, unlikely suspicion as to how you woke up, Avera. But  _you_  are a complete mystery to me."

At that, Emilia finally pried her eyes away from Avera and looked to Impa. "How do you think she woke up?" Emilia asked, wondering if Impa's idea could also somehow apply to her in a way she hadn't considered.

Impa pursed her wrinkled lips, stalling. "...How much has Link told you of himself?"

"Uh, just his name, and that he has no memory, really," Emilia said slowly, worried she might accidentally say something about him she shouldn't have known yet. "Is there something I should know...?"

"Link died 100 years ago and was placed into a medical facility known as the Shrine of Resurrection to be revitalized. We knew very little of the Shrine of Resurrection before he was placed in there; we didn't even know it would work  _at all_. I wonder ... if, perhaps, the shrine is more powerful than we ever thought—if its abilities have spread beyond its walls, seeping out into the world around it and revitalizing others." Impa shook her head. "It's quite unlikely, but it was all I could think of. If that were the case, I would imagine the dozens of people in our graveyard would have all awoken, not just one—and it also fails to explain how you got here from a different country.

"But, as I've said, I know someone who could potentially help figure out what happened," Impa went on. "She runs her own research lab in Hateno Village."

"The same person you said would be able to fix my Sheikah Slate?" Link said.

"Yes, that is her. If you leave immediately and get yourselves some horses, you have a chance at making it there before nightfall."

Impa slowly stood up, and the others followed her lead. With Avera having been sitting before, Emilia hadn't noticed how tall and thin she was, and noticing only made her feeling of familiarity double. She  _had_  to have seen her before.

_Maybe there is something connecting us._

"I'd like to see you all again once you've spoken to her," Impa said. "Tell the leaders of Hateno to listen for anyone in their graveyards, and listen for others yourselves along the way. And please... Be safe."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> click [here](https://www.deviantart.com/miserymire/art/Avera-Wandering-Spirits-832676982) for a li'l character sheet of Avera on DeviantArt, and [here](https://www.deviantart.com/miserymire/art/Emilia-Wandering-Spirits-832676791) for one of Emilia!


End file.
